Q&A

Most of the social media channels are a Business to Consumer (B2C), but can they be used for Business to Business (B2B) communications as well? And how efficiently? In our weekly Q&A session with Neil Walter, we talked through the areas of B2B social media communication. If you would like to participate in our next Q&A and ask your questions, please sign up and register here. As some of the issues contain business information, we only show the general ones here as we’re always respecting our clients’ and prospects’ privacy.

Where should I structure my social media team?

Your social media team should be your go-to point for all of your sales people and marketing team. They should be placed horizontally on your wider communication team to get the most out from social media in the benefit of a better marketing.

What’s the main difference between LinkedIn ads and AdWords?

Targeting. With LinkedIn, you can find people and not the people’s interests like in AdWords. You can communicate directly to the decision makers of related companies. This communication can be business/personal through LinkedIn messages or a sponsored story your organisation can share online. This sophisticated targeting though comes with a bigger price cap compared to traditional ads like AdWords.

How should I determine on the platforms?

Don’t determine on them, use as many social platforms as you can maintain with good content. If you are highly sales-led, and you focus on lead generation mainly, focus on LinkedIn first and build up a smooth process to funnel those leads. If you are more into branding, use any other social media channels you would like and those which you can fill up with relevant content.

Digital customer service is on the rise but how can you turn it into a powerhouse with digital analytics. In our weekly Q&A session with Neil Walter, we talked through the efficient digital customer service practices. If you would like to participate in our next Q&A and ask your questions, please sign up and register here. As some of the questions contained business information, we only show the general ones here as we’re always respecting our clients’ and prospects’ privacy.

We have just launched our digital product. Do we need to step into customer service or we can wait until we have a serious demand from our clients?

The simple answer is yes; you need to step in. You need to have at least your customer service policies and the measurement in place. However, you can wait for the higher demand from customers to make things serious, but make sure, your approach to digital customer service is scalable.

We get a lot of negative reviews and comments on our digital platforms. How can we handle them?

Hate speech and irrelevant comments has to be deleted immediately, there are amazing tools for their management like Conversocial. Negative reviews however cannot be combated, but the damage can be managed by acting promptly and fast with a cutting edge customer service. Digital analytics can help you to understand the negative reviewers and the reason behind the reviews.

We use live chat functions on our site for customer service purposes. How can digital analytics help to perform better on live chat?

Simply by connecting your live chat customer service with your digital analytics team or tool. When a logged in user engages on a live chat support, the customer service will know whom they are dealing with. If they have live data on the customer’s actions, they will have a pretty clear idea on what would be the issue, even before talking to the customer. All customer service personnel has to know how customer insights work, they can use it to prevent and proactively solve customer service issues.

Most social media channels focus on business to consumer (B2C), but can they be used for business to business (B2B) communication effectively? We believe in people, and not companies. Individuals who create organisations and individuals who are communicating on behalf of a company, therefore we don’t think there should be a necessary distinction between the two segments in social media. But there are some general rules. This post is all about these rules and trends.

Not just LinkedIn

If anyone mentions B2B and social media, the first thing to come to mind is LinkedIn. The reason is that B2B marketers only think of leads and LinkedIn is the most useful tool to generate leads. But social media marketing is not – just – about generating leads, it is also about pulling consumers into your communication. It’s longer term branding, rather than sales. Facebook is great for community building and instant communication, Twitter can spread your news and Instagram, and YouTube can help you in visual branding. Once you’ve mastered social media communication, the old cold calls, and cold sales will seem too traditional. The best leads are those that come to you before you even reach out to them, this is also known as inbound marketing.

Your company – your personality

The tone of voice is highly important. As you are a company, you have company values. Same as people, who also have values. Creating an efficient tone of voice is a must, that reflects your company’s values and effectively creates a company personality. Use this tone of voice every time you engage on social media, and it makes your company more human, more approachable, more open. Consider creating a style guide if you haven’t already, that helps define your brand personality.

Personalities, like people, are nothing without good connections to others.

Don’t be afraid to engage with other users on social media personally with your company accounts. Just remember, social media is not a presentation of your company values –it’s a table for two (or more) people having a conversation.

Create a process and find the right person

It’s a rare thing when your traditional direct marketer or sales team can be as productive on social media as a tailored social media manager or digital marketer. Hire someone who has an already established reputation on social media, in any field.

Writing down your social media strategy and the processes you need to implement it, is also beneficial. This should contain the platforms you use and how, your written tone of voice guidelines, your preferred metrics, KPIs and goals for social media and the internal processes to implement the strategy successfully.

TIP: Consider hiring a social media agency for a short period of time to get best practices implemented for your business.

Setting up an excellent and efficient content marketing plan is a strategic decision. But how do you evaluate your content marketing plan with analytics? In our weekly Q&A session with Neil Walter, we walked through the right tools and KPI sets for evaluation. If you would like to participate in our next Q&A and ask your questions, please sign up and register here. As some of the questions contained business information, we only show the general ones here as we’re always respecting our clients’ and prospects’ privacy.

We have an eCommerce shop, what would be our most important evaluation KPI regarding content marketing?

It depends on the product(s) that you’re selling online. If a community can bring you good values to the table, then engagements and audience growth would be a good option. But in general, eCommerce is more interested in actionable metrics: traffic diverted from social networks to your shop, customer journey and behavior metrics on your site and placing product reviews as engagements by users. We firmly recommend to setup a good metrics system on your eCommerce site, Google Analytics’ Enhanced Ecommerce would be a starting point.

I have a lot of likes on my posts but very few comments and shares. How would you define the importance of difference engagement metrics and how can we improve our engagements?

An engagement is as important as much time need to be put in by the user to engage with the content. A like is easy and one click. Commenting something is another story, they need to be very interested in the content to comment on it. Sharing is like putting on a branded badge; that’s the most critical engagement. To improve the involvement of your community, you need to ask them to contribute. Placing relevant call-to-actions in your content will definitely increase the rate of contribution.

We are managing a company blog. We have excellent views, but the scroll depth is low. How can we improve and encourage users to read the whole article?

First of all, let’s be honest: most of the users don’t have time read everything through, there’s too much noise on the internet. It’s not a bad thing that users won’t read your whole article. Second, make sure you have all the necessary info placed in your leads of your articles. Also, make sure that you have placed relevant highlights of your posts, key statements in your posts so users will quickly consume the key takeaways without even reading through your whole argument behind it.

Knowing the tools to harvest data from your site is easy, but getting relevant insights that are actionable is hard. In our weekly Q&A session with Neil Walter, we walked through the essentials differences between insights and data. If you would like to participate in our next Q&A and ask your questions, please sign up and register here. As some of the questions contained business information, we only show the general ones here as we’re always respecting our clients’ and prospects’ privacy.

We use Google Analytics and Omniture to measure the traffic on our site, but the two tools show different figures, why?

There’s always a discrepancy between two measurement tools. What you need to check is that the amount of discrepancy and the constant gap between the figures. If you can figure out which tool can’t pick up a particular type of traffic that the other tool can, fix the issue and narrow the gap. But having a small 5% difference between tools is ok.

I know what my goals are, but the tool that I use to measure my KPIs can’t deliver insights, what should I do?

The tool that you are using – if it’s an in-depth analytics tool, like Google Analytics – can produce the stats you need, only your setup has some hiatuses. Try to synchronize other tools together if you still have empty spaces, like adding your AdWords account to your Analytics or use Facebook Pixel to measure your Facebook PPC ads. You only need to do the setup right once.

How can I determine the amount of reporting I need and the frequency of reports?

If your site produces content on a weekly schedule, you might need a more frequent reporting. If your site is static for months, you might only require quarterly reports. Some clients only need one-off reports to determine the issues and get actionable insights to solve them. Only do reports if they are useful for you.